Numbers–What Does Marital Unfaithfulness Have to Do with the Gospel? (Part 1 of 3) by Robert Cheong

Have you ever had to deal with marital unfaithfulness, or known someone who has? After you discovered the adultery, you experienced intense struggles that ran both deep and wide: the betrayal and deliberate deceit.  The assault against the marriage covenant.  The allowance and intrusion of another into the intimate one flesh relationship.  The imagination that envisions the disgusting details. Outrage, grief, self-condemnation, denial, and bitterness saturate your soul, overwhelm your mind, and attack your body.

Or you, as the spouse who committed adultery, struggle in an equally intense, yet very different way: the fear of having hurt your spouse beyond forgiveness; the ambivalence of a heart longing for the freedom and feelings associated with the forbidden pleasures but also bearing the guilt for the betrayal and lies for something that seems surreal.  The confusion, or fog, brought about by the despicable actions you never imagined doing.  The shame of being ruled by total self-centered pleasure at the risk of everything important–your marriage , family, health, even job.

Can you as the offended or offending spouse ever recover from such a mess? Can the marriage ever be salvaged? Can the relationship between husband and wife ever be reconciled? No one enters enter marriage desiring to be sinned against or to sin through adultery, but things are not the way they are supposed to be … we live in a wicked world with desperately wicked hearts. But what does marital unfaithfulness have to do with the gospel? We will explore two major ways adultery must be connected with the gospel for life to make sense and for recovery to be possible.